He couldn’t leave them there; he couldn’t leave Pauline with Rosamund, and he couldn’t leave Rosamund with Pauline. So he sat up in a chair with his back turned to the bed. No. He didn’t make any attempt to go back. He says he knew she was still lying there, guarding his place, which was her place. The odd thing is that he wasn’t in the least disturbed or frightened or surprised. He took the whole thing as a matter of course. And presently he dozed off into a sleep. A scream woke him and the sound of a violent body leaping out of the bed and thudding on to its feet. He switched on the light and saw the bedclothes flung back and Pauline standing on the floor with her mouth open. He went to her and held her. She was cold to the touch and shaking with terror, and her jaws dropped as if she was palsied. She said, “Edward, there’s something in the bed.” He glanced again at the bed. It was empty. “There isn’t,” he said. “Look.” He stripped the bed to the foot-rail, so that she could see. “There _was_ something.” “Do you see it?” [Illustration] “No, I felt it.” She told him. First something had come swinging, smack across her face. A thick, heavy rope of woman’s hair. It had waked her. Then she had put out her hands and felt the body. A woman’s body, soft and horrible; her fingers had sunk in the shallow breasts. Then she had screamed and jumped. And she couldn’t stay in the room. The room, she said, was “beastly.” She slept in Marston’s room, in his small single bed, and he sat up with her all night, on a chair. She believed now that he had really seen something, and she remembered that the library was beastly, too. Haunted by something. She supposed that was what she had felt. Very well. Two rooms in the house were haunted; their bedroom and the library. They would just have to avoid those two rooms. She had made up her mind, you see, that it was nothing but a case of an ordinary haunted house; the sort of thing you’re always hearing about and never believe in till it happens to yourself. Marston didn’t like to point out to her that the house hadn’t been haunted till she came into it. The following night, the fourth night, she was to sleep in the spare room on the top floor, next to the servants, and Marston in his own room. But Marston didn’t sleep. He kept on wondering whether he would or would not go up to Pauline’s room. That made him horribly restless, and instead of undressing and going to bed, he sat up on a chair with a book. He wasn’t nervous; but he had a queer feeling that something was going to happen, and that he must be ready for it, and that he’d better be dressed.